Scraping By On 173 Million Dollars

I made a trip Sunday to Home Depot in Hillsborough to pick up some furnace filters. (Don’t worry, I actually bought the correct sized ones this time.) I haven’t been in that store for quite a long time - mostly because it is more convenient to hit up the two nearby Home Depots in Durham when stopping on the way home from work.

A brain cramp ensued when I went to the wrong section of the store for the filters. Could have been because the three Home Depots seemed to be configured slightly different. Most likely just another Senior Moment. Anyways as I was wandering around looking for the right aisle, I must have had a sufficient look of bewilderment such that one of the helpful associates pounced on me. I was proudly sporting my black Pirate hat with the Nike swoosh.

RIP – 1521 Ninth Street

1521 Ninth Street - Altoona PA

As detailed in this article from the Altoona Mirror, my childhood home, 1521 Ninth Street in the Fairview neighborhood of Altoona, is slated to be razed and paved over to create some new parking spaces for Altoona Regional Hospital.

It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask

On the way back from Altoona on Sunday, we took a route that led us down I-81 and then US-29 through Virginia into Greensboro. After three days of bar-and-grill food, ballpark food, and pizza in the hotel rooms, we were all ready for something a little different. 

I had my heart set on a Cracker Barrel as I was hankering for some breakfast and strong coffee. I especially enjoy their Momma’s French Toast Breakfast, but when we located a CB, that restaurant was packed up with two tour bus’ worth of patrons, so we ambled down the road a bit. We settled on a stop off at a Golden Corral in Waynesboro, VA off of I-64 around 2:00 PM.

Bad Information

Tomorrow at 9:00 AM, the "Freeh Report on the Pennsylvania State University” will be published at this site. The report is the output from the $12 million USD investigation into “the facts and circumstances of the actions of The Pennsylvania State University surrounding the child abuse committed by a former employee, Gerald A. Sandusky”. The investigation was driven by former FBI Director Louis Freeh. I hope the IT staff that administers that website knows what they are doing. Something tells me that there might be some serious HTTP traffic heading their way tomorrow morning.

Top Ten Signs You Are Suffering from Pirate Fever

With apologies to David Letterman – From the home office in Hillsborough,NC, here are the Top Ten signs that you are suffering from Pirates Fever (2012 edition). Drum roll please….

MLB.TV on the Roku

Three and one-half and four. That is what I am going with as the record of the Pirates since I purchased a subscription to MLB.TV last Sunday afternoon. I am generously counting the Sunday game against the Royals as the one-half part of the win total since I had everything up and configured and running in time to watch the last couple of innings of that game. While it remains to be seen whether I will once again have tragically bought into the Pirates at their “52-week high” like last year, I am feeling much better after the weekend games against the Tribe and last night’s Twin’s game. How about El Toro?

When last seen, I was off to research and eventually buy a streaming digital video player to supplant the streaming capabilities of my Sony BDP-N460 (which doesn’t support MLB.TV). There are a ton of players in this space, but going in, my preconception was that this was a two-horse race between Apple TV and Roku. That preconception was validated by my research.  I won’t go into the boring details on the feeds and speeds - there are about a gazillion articles comparing the two product lines. The nutshell that I was able to ferret out was that:

Decisions

Saturday afternoon I was really jonesing for some Pirate’s baseball and came this close to an impulse buy of the MLB Extra Innings baseball package from my cable company, TWC. What can I say – it’s in the blood. My team is playing well, winning close games with pitching, defense, and a sprinkling of speed to offset the anemic sticks. The bullpen looks incredibly strong this year and the starting rotation a good bit deeper. Anything can happen, but I just don’t see a complete collapse occurring this year. The division is considerably weaker than last year’s edition – and the schedule, really front-loaded this year with strong teams, thins out a bit over the next couple of months.